Anna Karenina eBook

When they got up from dinner and Tushkevitch had
gone to get a box at the opera, Yashvin went to smoke,
and Vronsky went down with him to his own rooms.
After sitting there for some time he ran upstairs.
Anna was already dressed in a low-necked gown of
light silk and velvet that she had had made in Paris,
and with costly white lace on her head, framing her
face, and particularly becoming, showing up her dazzling
beauty.

“Are you really going to the theater?”
he said, trying not to look at her.

“Why do you ask with such alarm?” she
said, wounded again at his not looking at her.
“Why shouldn’t I go?”

She appeared not to understand the motive of his words.

“Oh, of course, there’s no reason whatever,”
he said, frowning.

“That’s just what I say,” she said,
willfully refusing to see the irony of his tone, and
quietly turning back her long, perfumed glove.

“Anna, for God’s sake! what is the matter
with you?” he said, appealing to her exactly
as once her husband had done.

“I don’t understand what you are asking.”

“You know that it’s out of the question
to go.”

“Why so? I’m not going alone.
Princess Varvara has gone to dress, she is going
with me.”

He shrugged his shoulders with an air of perplexity
and despair.

“But do you mean to say you don’t know?...”
he began.

“But I don’t care to know!” she
almost shrieked. “I don’t care to.
Do I regret what I have done? No, no, no!
If it were all to do again from the beginning, it
would be the same. For us, for you and for me,
there is only one thing that matters, whether we love
each other. Other people we need not consider.
Why are we living here apart and not seeing each
other? Why can’t I go? I love you,
and I don’t care for anything,” she said
in Russian, glancing at him with a peculiar gleam
in her eyes that he could not understand. “If
you have not changed to me, why don’t you look
at me?”

He looked at her. He saw all the beauty of her
face and full dress, always so becoming to her.
But now her beauty and elegance were just what irritated
him.

“My feeling cannot change, you know, but I beg
you, I entreat you,” he said again in French,
with a note of tender supplication in his voice, but
with coldness in his eyes.

She did not hear his words, but she saw the coldness
of his eyes, and answered with irritation:

Chapter 33

Vronsky for the first time experienced a feeling of
anger against Anna, almost a hatred for her willfully
refusing to understand her own position. This
feeling was aggravated by his being unable to tell
her plainly the cause of his anger. If he had
told her directly what he was thinking, he would have
said: